Grabbing from below: a study of land reclamation in Egypt

ABSTRACT

The article questions state land commodification and the expansion of frontiers in land reclamation projects in Egypt. It does so by drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in the form of in-depth interviews and archival research on land tenure relations in Wadi Al-Nukra, Upper Egypt. In the article, actors and structure dynamics are situated in the wider political economy framework in order to guide both the data collection and the discussion surrounding the results. The key finding was that agricultural development in the desert created a particular class formation and resulted in specific land concentration. It did not lead to the hegemony of agribusiness nor to the success of desert agriculture in solving agrarian questions or issues relating to food security and population redistribution. The coexistence of different legal frameworks, development policies and discourses concerning allocation of state land, all of these coming from different backgrounds, has led to the concentration of property and to cronyism. It also reveals a deepening social differentiation and class formation. The land reclamation project in desert areas is increasingly moving towards an acceleration of the commodification of state land used for production, accumulation and speculation.

RÉSUMÉ

L’article remet en question la marchandisation des terres domaniales et l’expansion des frontières dans les projets de mise en valeur agricole des terres en Égypte. Pour ce faire, il s’appuie sur des travaux ethnographiques réalisés sur le terrain sous la forme d’entretiens approfondis et de recherches archivistiques sur les relations foncières à Wadi Al-Nukra, en Haute-Égypte. Dans cet article, les acteurs et les dynamiques structurelles sont situés dans le cadre plus large de l’économie politique afin d’orienter à la fois la collecte des données et la discussion autour des résultats. La principale conclusion a été que le développement agricole dans le désert a créé une formation de classe particulière et a entraîné une concentration spécifique des terres. Cela n’a pas conduit à l’hégémonie de l’agro-industrie ni au succès de l’agriculture du désert dans la résolution de questions agraires et de questions relatives à la sécurité alimentaire et à la redistribution de la population. La coexistence de différents cadres juridiques, politiques de développement, et discours concernant l’attribution des terres domaniales, tous issus d’horizons différents, a conduit à la concentration de la propriété et au copinage. Elle révèle également une différenciation sociale et une formation de classe de plus en plus profondes. Le projet de mise en valeur agricole des terres dans les zones désertiques s’oriente de plus en plus vers une accélération de la marchandisation des terres domaniales utilisées pour la production, l’accumulation et la spéculation.

KEYWORDS:

• Land grabs
• state land
• land policies
• desert reclamation
• formalisation
• tenure
• Egypt

MOTS-CLÉS:

• Accaparement des terres
• terre d’Etat
• politiques foncières
• mise en valeur agricole du désert
• formalisation
• régime foncière
• Égypte

Acknowledgements

Funding for the research was provided by Arab Council for Social Sciences (ACSS) programme ‘Environmentalism, Impoverishment and Social Justice Movements: Interdisciplinary Perspectives’, funded by the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (Sida). I would like to thank Mathilde Fautras and Giulio Iocco for their coordinating and editing work, from the preparations for the workshop ‘Land Questions in North Africa’, which took place on 25–26 September 2018 in Berlin, up to the final stages of this article. I thank the European Research Council (ERC) under the European research and innovation programme Horizon 2020 (grant agreement no. 695674), and from the promoting institutions of the ERC TARICA – the French National Centre of Scientific Research (CNRS) and the Institute of Research on the Contemporary Maghreb (IRMC) – and the Centre for Modern Oriental Studies (ZMO) for funding my participation in the Berlin workshop. This article benefited from Yasmin Ahmed’s comments and Karim Hamed helped to map the study area. Last, but not least, I am indebted to Elisa Greco, Ray Bush, and Review of African Political Economy’s anonymous reviewers for providing helpful and insightful critiques of an earlier draft of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Note on contributor

Saker El Nour has a PhD from Université Paris Ouest Nanterre La Défense, and is a Research Fellow in UMR 201 Development and Societies, the Joint Research Unit of the French National Research Institute for Sustainable Development (IRD) and Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne. He can be reached at [email protected].

Notes

1 GARPAD included several companies: Al-Behera Company, Al ‘Aqahya Company, Wadi Kom Ombo Company, General Company for Land Reclamation, and the Arab Company.

2 Theoretically the allocation can be to a man or woman, but in this case study, plots were allocated only to men.

3 For example, Law No. 143 of 1981, as well as Presidential Decree No. 154 of 2001.